To add to the request of James Miner fior the 100 most common Pali words, I
had been thinking recently of asking a somewhat similar question: Has a
statistical count been carried out for Pali ? I have a useful word
frequency program (Hermetic Word Frequency Counter 3.07) but the difficulty
to use it for Pali / Sanskrit is the large number of compounds and the words
coalesced through sandhi. Given these problems, I can't see how it could be
done -- so in the end I didn't bother to ask, though such a word frequency
list would be useful for pedagogical purposes.